Orwell's Roses

Orwell's Roses

Rebecca Solnit (Viking, 2021)

I'm always drawn to books that serve as portals to the Infinite Library, and this one is a classic. Delightful in its own right, it would also serve well as a companion to a book club or an adult education class reading George Orwell. Orwell's Roses is lightly biographical, but far more than that; Rebecca Solnit is the contemporary writer who can actually match and follow Orwell's range of interests, small and large, botanical and political.

I read Orwell in high school, like most people perhaps, and some of the essays still linger in mind: "Such, such were the joys," an essay about the misery of his school days, being crammed with facts for the entrance exams to Eton; "Shooting an Elephant," about serving in Burma as a colonial policeman; and "Politics and the English Language," surely still a guide to the wiles of propaganda. But now I'd want to read Homage to Catalonia alongside other people's war stories, and side by side with Animal Farm, to find out how Trotsky figures in both.

Orwell planted the roses of the title in 1936. Later the same year, he went to Spain to fight on the Loyalist side against Franco, an experience that deeply informed him as a thinker and a writer. Ten years later, he wrote about the roses and their outsized return on investment: "One of the fruit trees and one of the rose bushes died, but the rest are all flourishing. The sum total is five fruit trees, seven roses and two gooseberry bushes, all for twelve and sixpence."

Solnit was actually looking for those trees when she stopped, on her way from London to Cambridge, in the tiny Hertfordshire village of Wallington, to which Orwell and his wife moved in 1936. The trees are gone, but two of the roses still bear flowers. Solnit felt a 'joyous exaltation' to stand in their presence and realize that "this man most famous for his prescient scrutiny of totalitarianism and propaganda, for facing unpleasant facts, for a spare prose style and an unyielding political vision, had planted roses." As she will discover, and demonstrate, Orwell lets nature and beauty into his writing, even at its grimmest.

In the 1940's, many of his essays were published in Tribune, a socialist weekly. Then as now, the political Left had a puritanical, ascetic streak, which Orwell resisted head on: "...is it politically reprehensible...to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird's song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is no doubt that many people think so." At the heart of such idiosyncratic, personal pleasures lies a fundamental sense of liberty. There must always be things, however small and transient, that no one can take away from us; many of the best of them were not given to us by people in the first place.

At the same time, Solnit is looking into the largest possible distances and spans of time. What trees are still standing that your grandparents might have planted? No, go back to the Sequoias of Solnit's native California, standing for thousands of years. No, go back to the Carboniferous period, three hundred million years ago, when the sunlight was captured that would become the coal and oil deposits we've been burning for the past three hundred years.

And, much as Orwell reported on the northern coal mines in The Road to Wigan Pier, Solnit goes to Colombia to look into the industrial growing of roses for the North American market. How did you think those millions of dozens of roses got to all the local florists for Mothers' Day? It's a far cry from picking up a few plants at Woolworth's.

Still, at least as far back as 1910, 'Bread and Roses' have been paired as necessities of life worth fighting for. "Bread fed the body, roses fed something subtler: not just hearts, but imaginations, psyches, senses, identities. It was a pretty slogan but a fierce argument that more than survival and bodily well-being were needed and were being demanded as a right." Orwell may not have known the slogan, but he was evidently in full sympathy with what it stands for. In one of his greatest essays, "Why I Write," he says this: "So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information." What a worthy ambition!

 

 

Any Good Books, April 2022, by email

 

One Summer: America, 1927

One Summer: America, 1927

Bill Bryson (2013, Doubleday)

     Any moment can be a historic moment, of course, and the world is always changing; but it's pretty hard to beat Bill Bryson's choice of 1927 as the year that changed everything. It would also be pretty hard to beat Bryson's gift for drawing characters and spinning narratives out of the American scene of the time. Giants walked the earth - Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Al Capone, and, probably first of all, Charles A. Lindbergh.

     At 7:52 on May 20, Lindbergh took off from a muddy runway at Roosevelt Field on Long Island, barely clearing the telephone wires in his path. 33 hours, 30 minutes, and 29.8 seconds later, he touched down at Le Bourget, outside of Paris, France. "In that instant, a pulse of joy swept around the earth. Within minutes the whole of America knew he was safe in Paris." He had flown by dead reckoning through the night, in a cloth-skinned plane with no way of looking out the front. It was a truly brilliant feat of aviation. The degree of fame that came with the feat was unprecedented, too. The boyish twenty-five-year old from a modest Minnesota background was suddenly unable to do anything or go anywhere without an adoring crowd turning up.

     One reason that was true was that radio had established a foothold in the United States, thanks in large part to a man named David Sarnoff, who saw the possibilities of the medium and helped to found the National Broadcasting Company. Sarnoff also grasped that hearing advertisements was a price audiences did not particularly mind paying; NBC sold ten million dollars worth of advertising in its second year on the air, and continued to dominate the business through the Depression, as newspapers failed on every side.

     The automotive industry was also hitting its stride, which would change the American landscape profoundly. Henry Ford gets a chapter, full of glorious eccentricity and questionable business sense. By 1927, Chrysler and General Motors were stealing a march on Ford, but he had already made his mark by bringing cars within the reach of ordinary working people, permitting them to move out of cities.

     The Twenties were a violent time, more than we now remember. Prohibition, of course, made criminals of citizens, and heroes of criminals. Anarchists planted bombs, sometimes blowing themselves up in the process. Nicolo Sacco and Bart Vanzetti were executed in 1927 for a robbery that took place in 1920, or perhaps for being immigrants with dangerously radical friends; historians haven't quite made up their minds. The Ku Klux Klan enforced not just segregation, but subjugation. "The Klan hated everybody, but it did so in ways strategically contrived to reflect regional biases, so that it focused on Catholics and Jews in the Midwest, Orientals and Catholics in the Far West, Jews and southern Europeans in the East, and blacks everywhere."

     Those biases were found in more respectable circles as well, in the form of a eugenics movement that bore the imprimatur of scientists from the leading universities. In the spring of 1927, by a vote of 8-1, the U.S. Supreme Court permitted a woman to be sterilized on the grounds of being feeble-minded. Scientific theories about the superiority of northern Europeans over Jews, southern and eastern Europeans, Asians and Africans were as spurious as they were self-interested, but they influenced housing segregation in the U.S., and encouraged the Nazis in some of their most deranged practices.

      For all that, the mood of this book is cheerful, and occasionally joyful. Babe Ruth's mighty bat brought delight to thousands; the golden age of the movies was just getting started; and Charles Lindbergh may have had a miserable time being thrust into the limelight, but his achievement made America feel like anything was possible.

 

 

Any Good Books, 1 March 2022